IOWA CITY

One recent morning, following a night of summer thunderstorms, a Johnson County Sheriff staffer showed up at work only to find the top of her desk covered in water.

Walk down a hallway in the Sheriff Department’s building and you’ll see stains on the ceiling tiles from water leaks.

Walk down that same hallway during a storm and you’ll see buckets strategically placed to catch the falling drips of water.

Those are just the obvious and visible signs of an aging building that was constructed more than 40 years ago for a sheriff department staff that was less than half its current size and for a maximum inmate population of just 46.

An exclusive tour provided for The News provided a picture of a county facility that has open cracks on walls, other cracks that have been sealed and repaired, mats and inmate uniforms stacked along hallways because of limited storage space, a medical room that is little bigger than a small office for one, a physical fitness center of just two stationary cycling machines stuffed into a conference room, and a monitoring room that is often packed with multiple deputies at the same time.

Outside the building, six monitoring devices on each of the four exterior walls constantly keep an eye on if, and how far, the structure of the exterior is actually moving. In some corners, where brickwork is supposed to meet up with horizontal structural beams, large gaps have emerged.

The building has deteriorated so much that a plan is being developed to move prisoners to other county jails should that immediate need occur. Sheriff Brad Kunkel has assured the Johnson County Board of Supervisors that such a moment is not “imminent.”

But perhaps, inevitable.

An analysis of the building in August 2023 by Axiom Consultants, an Iowa City-based engineering firm, specified a number of repairs that needed immediate attention. Among those is a roof replacement, along with notable cracks and deficiencies in exterior and interior brickwork and walls.

Former Lone Tree Mayor Jon Green, who is now the Johnson County Board of Supervisors Vice Chair, examined the roof with Kunkel in early July, then re-visited the building 10 days later with Board Chair Rod Sullivan, and arrived at this conclusion:

“The jail needs (to be) replaced, both for those who work there and also for those who are incarcerated there,” Green told The News. “We’re working on a bid package for a new roof and the replacement of the HVAC system, which won’t be cheap.”

Another analysis, by Shive-Hattery, an architectural and engineering firm in Iowa City, produced a conceptual design of a new $80 million facility, which was based on past statistic inmate figures and future projections, among other data, which caused a lengthy discussion during a Board of Supervisors work session in July.

Supervisor V Fixmer-Oraiz, who wanted a task force assembled to examine the jail, rejected Shive-Hattery’s report.

“We need to know who is in the jail and why, how they got there, why are they coming back?” Fixmer-Oraiz said. “We know that jails tear up our families, destroy people’s careers. There is nothing rehabilitative about a jail. You cannot give somebody care in a jail. Fundamentally, you cannot.”

“I’m confident we all agree the building is no longer providing the needs of today’s world and that the building is deteriorating and is at the end of its life,” Kunkel told The News.

“There’s no reason for this to be an adversarial process,” he said. “All I have to offer is the condition of the building, the facts of the matter, and the intention of the entire office.”

Shive-Hattery’s recommendation, following a study that was conducted over months, called for a new complex at a different location that would be big enough for 140 inmate beds and also a growing department that is already over 100 staffers and deputies.

“I really want to hold us to a higher standard,” Fixmer-Oraiz said during a Board work session nearly a year ago when the topic came up. “I’m not looking for more beds or a cleaner place. I’m looking for a better system overall.”

Bond referendums for new facilities have failed multiple times since 2000, yet the status of a new jail was among the biggest topics brought up by county residents in one-on-one conversations with county supervisors and the sheriff at the recent Johnson County Fair.

“The public cares a lot about this,” Kunkel said. “I get asked about it all the time. It was really the only topic I heard about at the fair.”

“Yes, the talk is the jail,” Supervisor Royceann Porter said during the Board’s formal session July 25. “It is on the radar. The jail is out there. People are talking about it, knowing that we need a jail.”

“I don’t want to continue dumping money into a hole,” Green told The News, “but we’ve got to come up with a proposal that’ll get enough votes to pass.”

Former Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek, who served for four four-year terms, told The Gazette of Cedar Rapids in 2020 that not overseeing the building of a new jail during his tenure was one of his biggest regrets.

Hopes for a new jail then fell to Kunkel, who served as a detective sergeant under Pulkrabek and received an endorsement from Pulkrabek before winning election in 2020. He is running unopposed on the Democratic ticket in the November general election.

“I wish more people were paying attention because it is important,” Kunkel said. “We’re going to get to the point, it’s going to cost us a lot of money and we have to think about the amount we’re spending. Is it better spent on repairing and rehabbing versus building something new? At some point, Band-aids are not cost effective and we can’t keep doing this.”

A walk into and around the 43-year-old building clearly displays those Band-aids.

Showers leak from the second floor of the building, where inmates are held, down to the first floor. Horizontal and vertical cracks have emerged, which in some cases are mystifying because there aren’t associated cracks at the same areas on the outside of the building. Floor tiles in the kitchen buckle during cold days in the winter.

“Something is happening structurally,” Kunkel said.

And then, there is the space. The sheriff staff itself has more than doubled since 1981, when the current jail replaced one that had been in place since 1901. Equipment and materials line the hallways. Five or six inmates are usually kept in cell blocks that were designed for a maximum of eight, but at busy times the number of prisoners in one cell block hits double figures.

“We’ve had to spread more people out in the building to deal with fights, behavorial problems, people who need some sort of special management,” Kunkel said. “The jail we have today doesn’t meet the needs of 2024 and kind of the broad array of things you need to deal with.”

The tightness of the booking room is clearly a challenge, especially when the moment turns physical.

“There’s really no room in here to navigate without somebody getting hurt,” Kunkel said. “It’s not adequate for the booking space we really need anymore.”

The command center, which includes video monitors of all portions of the building, sometimes has as many as 10 deputies in the room at once, Kunkel said.

“It is chaotic and they do an outstanding job dealing with it every day,” he said of the command center deputies and staffers.

The site of a new jail and sheriff’s department is likely to be different than the department’s current location on South Capitol Street in Iowa City, where it is surrounded by University of Iowa parking lots and property. There is little room for public parking or deputies and staffers.

While Iowa City police officers patrol the city, County deputies patrol the rest of Johnson County and are the only law enforcement officers contracted to patrol such cities as Lone Tree, Hills and even fast-growing Tiffin.

“Is down here a solution? No,” Kunkel said.

“If there’s a deputy here and they have to leave here and respond emergent to Lone Tree or Solon, they’re now having to go light some sirens and navigate towns to get out of town,” he said. “There’s a lot of risk there. You have pedestrians, other cars. Then, add in when school (University of Iowa) is in session, students everywhere. So there’s a lot of risk every day with responding emergents from down here. It’s unnecessary risk, at this point. Having our patrol division and everything else here does not make sense to me.”

In the meantime, the City of Iowa City has approached Johnson County about a possibility of building a new law enforcement campus that would be for both county and city police and staffers. That possibility could throw one more curve ball into a complex dilemma that will cost taxpayers millions of dollars, bond referendum or not.

“You build for what you have now and to accommodate future growth,” Kunkel said. “Roads aren’t built to accommodate X amount of cars now. It’s built for today, capacity for the future. Hospitals are built for today, capacity for the future. This is no different. Public safety facilities or infrastructure, we have to make a responsible decision about the needs of today and future generations.”